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December 18, 2014

The goal of the Monroe County History Center is to provide information and resources about Monroe County. The Monroe County History Center provides a variety of services and functions to meet this goal. They collect artifacts and records. Through their research, they gather context for their collections. They make their work accessible to the public.

“We accomplish this through exhibits that capture and tell important stories about the county’s past,” says Executive Director David Vanderstel.

The Monroe County History Center also contains a library with resources that trace local government, genealogy, and other records of the community. These resources are available to the public, and they serve as a great asset to professional researchers and scholars. Their online catalog serves the community and those outside of Monroe County as well.

September 6, 2011

The hunger-relief charity Feeding America has released numbers indicating one in four children in Indiana are “at risk of hunger,” according to a press release sent by Julio Alonso of the Hoosier Hills Food Bank.

The Feeding America project is called “Map the Meal Gap,” and includes an interactive map that is shaded to depict hunger in the United States. The more hungry residents a state has, the darker it is shaded. Two maps depict overall and child hunger; the map of child hunger is noticeably darker.

In Indiana, for example, 16 percent of adults are at risk of hunger, while “the food insecurity rate for children is 25.1 percent,” according to the release.

Being at risk of hunger means that the head of household does not have the resources to ensure all members of the household, or family, are getting enough calories every day. Many families experiencing this lack of food security use the services of places such as Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard, which the Hoosier Hills Food Bank supplies with food.

August 17, 2011

Kirsten Grønbjerg is a professor at the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs. She led the research team responsible for the report, which was released jointly by SPEA, the Center on Philanthropy, and the Indiana Business Research Center.

New data from the Indiana Nonprofit Reportreveals that between 2005 and 2009, employment rates and wages for Indiana nonprofits increased, despite declines in other sectors of the economy during that time.

According to the report, between 2005 and 2009, nonprofit employment grew by 5.9 percent, while during that same period for-profit employment fell 8.6 percent. Nonprofit growth was concentrated in the areas of health and education (but that doesn’t include public school teachers, who are considered government employees).

But for nonprofits in the areas of “arts, culture and recreation, social assistance, and membership associations” employment actually decreased.

While this report paints a rosy picture, the data is from 2009, and the recent debt ceiling deal has caused some in the nonprofit world to worry about the mandated cuts in “discretionary spending.”

The mandated cuts would exclude both Medicare and Medicaid. But if the congressional Super Committee fails to agree on budget cuts this fall, $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts would be triggered. These cuts also exempt “most mandatory programs such as Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program, TANF [Temporary Assistance for Need Families, commonly referred to as welfare], and food stamps,” according to an article in Nonprofit Quarterly.

But the $1.2 trillion in cuts have to come from somewhere. A Stateline article says that “everything from education funding to money for affordable housing to early childhood programs such as Head Start would be subject to the cuts at the trigger stage.”

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